Tag Archives: Flying Saucer Attack

Fluttery Records is honored to host Brian John Mitchell and his project Remora. Brian is owner of Silber Records, a painter, comic book creator and experimental musician. His music, recorded and released under the name Remora, uses guitar effects to build ambient dreamscapes and noisy terrors.

Remora has been around since 1996 bringing out post-apocalyptic pop songs to the masses. Dominated by often sole member Brian John Mitchell, Remora is often a sonic surprise – sometimes making walls of guitar noise & sometimes singing a capella while somehow maintaining the aesthetic that is Remora.

The 1990s saw Remora as a single guitar making ambient walls of tranquility & aggression. The 2000s saw Remora doing everything from a capella (Songs I Sing) & acoustic guitar releases (The Alcohol EPs) to robotic rhythms (Mecha) & a full band structure (Scars Bring Hope) & occassionally delving back to the guitar noise roots (Reversion, Derivative). Within the context of all these styles, the music remains recognizable as Remora in a genre of its own that Michell calls “post-apocalyptic pop” with equal influences from Joy Division, Jandek, Godflesh, lovesliescrushing, & Brian Eno.

On The Heart That Kills, Remora drifts away from the sci-fi-survival themes often prevalent in the lyrics & instead deals with the emotional apocalypse of the death of a loved one. In 2008 Mitchell pulled his grandmother out of a nursing home & quit his job to take care of her at home doing everything from making her meals to bathing her, by her side more or less 24 hours a day. In October 2011 she had a fall that caused an inner cranial bleed & after a week in a coma with Mitchell lying on the bed next to her holding her hand she died. Recorded within the following month in Mitchell’s bedroom, The Heart That Kills is a direct response to the feelings of anger, remorse, guilt, joy, hope, despair, & loneliness associated with the death of a loved one.

Predominantly The Heart That Kills is a drone record. It clocks in around 72 minutes with all but three of those minutes using two guitars & two bass guitars feeding back as the only sounds. At times the feedback is a somewhat passive presence & at other times it is an aggressive one, rising & falling like hope between labored breaths. Clearly this is not something meant for everyone. The remaining three minutes are split four ways between two a capella tracks (“Live Forever” & “Let Me Carry Her Body Through The Gates”), a glockenspiel track (“Chimes”), & the only traditional song structure on the album (the half funeral dirge/half anthem “Bring You Back”). This is not a fun record, this is not the “post rock party show” that Mitchell toured with five years ago, but it is perhaps the most important record of Remora’s discography.